Category: Blogging

Blog Migration!

Hey, everyone.  I just migrated my blog to WordPress (the software, not the site) from BlogEngine.NET.  I’ve been using the latter for quite a while now, and while fairly flexible and capable, I got to the point where it required a little too much care and feeding.  WordPress is by far the most widely used blog publishing software and has wide support for themes, plug-ins, etc., which has already made my life easier by relieving me of the need to customize much of what I needed.  Just the administration facilities for handling comments (and more specifically, SPAM comments) was worth the migration.

It wasn’t without it’s challenges, though.  I’ll cover the migration in a near future post, but I wanted to welcome you to the new platform as well as the new look and feel.  I’m using a theme named "Mystique" that I think is pleasing and functional.  To the right side there is a series of tabs where you can look through past posts, browse by keywords or categories, and see recent and popular comments and posts. 

I’ve still got a few issues in migrating all of the media, posts, and links, so bear with me as I get that all worked out (this only affects some past articles).  I also still need to implement a redirections scheme to map my old permalinks to the new ones (the scheme is slightly different now, and I no longer have extensions on the permalinks for forward compatibility).

In any case…let me know what you think…and welcome to my new virtual hangout.

Davey Dance Blog

This just might be the best use I’ve seen yet of a video blog.  Unfortunately, you have to watch these online (not a podcast for downloading automatically from the RSS).  Worth it though.  This is the latest episode.

“Davey Dance-BLOG. A project started while traveling Europe during Spring 2007. Armed only with an ipod and a Canon PowerShot, Davey picks a location and a pop song. Then Davey records an improvised dance.”

Davey Dance Blog -47- DUBLIN – Talking Heads “Houses in Motion” from Pheasant Plucker on Vimeo.

Dance on.

I Added My Cards

I’ve added my gamer card and my zune card to my blog, as you can see to the right ->.  I figured if I’m going to throw the details of my life out here on a blog, I may as well add ongoing details on my infrequent gaming endeavors as well as my music listening.

If anyone wants to embed their Zune Card or Xbox Live Gamer Card in their own forum posts, signatures, blog entries, or websites…it’s very easy to do.  See the details below.

GAMER CARD

For the Xbox Live Gamer Card, just take a look at this site.  Just copy and paste the “iframe” markup and put your own gamertag in there, and viola!

ZUNE CARD

For the Zune Card, it is very similar.  First, you must be part of the “social”.  For more information on that, see Zune.net.  If you have your Zune Social persona set up (usually the same as your gamer tag if you also have an Xbox), you just need to make sure that your profile is public (or no-one can see it).  Once you’ve got it all hanging out there, all you have to do is follow a similar procedure as the Gamer Card above.  Just copy and paste the following markup to where you want the card to show up.  This markup is for the “small” version of the Zune Card.

<div id=”zunecard_small”><embed flashvars=”baseURL=http%3a%2f%2fsocial.zune.net%2fzcard%2fusercardservice.ashx%3fzunetag%3dbillwil%26src%3dmedium&MMplayerType=PlugIn” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” height=”135″ src=”http://social.zune.net/xweb/lx/swf/zunecardmedium.swf?ver=1190″ bgcolor=”#FFF” id=”flashUserCard” style=”” salign=”tl” width=”250″ wmode=”opaque” name=”flashUserCard”></div>

Remember to change the part that says ‘billwil’ to whatever your Zune Tag is (using %20 for spaces, if you have them), or you will display my Zune Card.

Blog Software Update

Well, I finally got around to updating my blog software to something a little more modern that .text .9.  I’ve been playing around a bit with BlogEngine.NET, and version 1.2 was just released, so I finally moved my production blog to this blog engine.  I also changed hosting providers because while GoDaddy is the hometown incumbent…they are just too restrictive, so I dumped them.

I also did some customizations to the Indigo theme that ships with BlogEngine.  It was a good start, but there were some things that I didn’t like, so I changed them.  I wanted to get my hands dirty a bit with theme-ing and get under the covers of the software a bit, so it made sense.  I moved quite a bit around, added a top level nav system, and changed the way the admin links work (when your logged in as an admin) to make it all a bit cleaner.  I will likely eventually adapt a theme that I like better, but this should do for now.  If anyone wants my updated theme, I’d be glad to share it…just let me know via the contact page.

So far I’m very impressed with the software.  It is fairly flexible, easily customized, and pretty feature rich.  The tag cloud is something that I didn’t have with my last engine, and I like it quite a bit.  It even supports BlogML updates now, and in fact I used this feature to migrate my data (with a little tweaking).